Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @01:24PM
from the hope-your-isp-is-reliable dept.

pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

I do like the aspect of some apps being hosted online versus locally as it frees up a portion of your HDD, but before I commit fully to this idea I have to bring into question data security and bandwidth on this one. I know there is more bandwidth to come and that is simply a matter of time, but implementing an online desktop could potentially bring some big security issues into play.

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm? What about when you go to your country house, in the woods? To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

I mean, they do a lot of development, and they are the OSS company most trusted by Fortune 500's, but I think they lost their leadership position to Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu. Not trying to start a flamewar here, but they seem to be fresh out of ideas at present, and this seems to be grasping at straws.

After dealing with their nightmarish support system this month after a bug caused me to lose connection to my SAN, and dealing with the scam that is RHCE certification (30% pass rate is BS -- they're just milking retakes at $750 a pop), I can say that Red hat is really going downhill fast. They're becoming more and more focused on the bottom line and less on the little guy who got them to where they are.

I have to agree. The idea of online applications being "first class citizens with the traditional applications" to quote the story, suggests to me that online applications would need to have similar or identical security access to locally installed applications. This seems, uh... possibly problematic.

Storing your own data locally on your own computer and manipulating it with local apps may be "old thinking", but at least it puts you in control. Just when a critical mass of free (as in freedom) software is emerging, Red Hat is talking about services. I suspect it's impossible to make these services free as in freedom.

Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.

Yeah, I know Sun came up with that one a decade or so ago, and they were spot on, but it wasn't quite there.

The real winners will be the ones who can come up with transparent computing. By that, I mean if the machine is standalone it uses local resources, disk, cpu etc. If it's plugged into a network it automatically makes use of the best available hardware on the LAN.

I mean, they do a lot of development, and they are the OSS company most trusted by Fortune 500's, but I think they lost their leadership position to Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu.

You're joking, right? I mean, I'm using Ubuntu right now to post this, but Ubuntu are still getting action mostly with enthusiasts like me (and perhaps you). Corporate/enterprise users are virtually all using Red Hat, and Red Hat give them an excellent product (with a quite recent release full of new features).

If only they could work WITH Google to provide the offline client component.

Google's online offerings have matured, and are quite powerful, but there's still the disconnect when going offline. Not until I can work offline and seamlessly integrate/sync when I go back online will it be really effective.